Microsoft is retiring its famous email client, Outlook. This is arguably
overdue: it has long felt bloated and outdated.
The trouble is, Outlook has countless loyal fans who swear they could never
use anything else: they shun the more streamlined web version of Outlook,
which grew out of Hotmail, and refuse to believe that thousands of companies
and millions of individuals actually use Gmail for real work.
But for better or worse, the choice is no longer in their hands. The
Outlook we all loved (or hated) has been renamed
Classic Outlook on Windows and
Legacy Outlook on Mac, and
no longer ships with new PCs, with a view to its eventual withdrawal as
part of Microsoft’s roadmap to replace it.
What’s next?
If you use Windows, you might notice an app called Outlook (new) has been
installed automatically. In time, it will be simply called Outlook.
The new Outlook has clearly been built from scratch, inheriting little from
its predecessor. In fact, it looks and feels very much like the lightweight
web-based Outlook (formerly Hotmail) mentioned earlier.
If your email account is with Microsoft – in other words, your email
address ends in outlook.com, live.com, hotmail.com or hotmail.co.uk; or you
use Microsoft 365 email as part of an organisation – the new Outlook should
function well for you.
But for everyone else, there’s a notable devil in the detail that’s easily
overlooked: Outlook is no longer an IMAP client. That is, it doesn’t
directly connect to third-party email providers like AOL, BT, Google,
TalkTalk and Yahoo.
Instead, when you add one of these accounts to Outlook, you’re actually
giving Microsoft permission to maintain a connection to your email provider
within its cloud infrastructure, and to cache a copy of your mail on its
servers. Outlook then provides a view of those messages, and changes you
make in Outlook sync via the Microsoft cloud back to your provider.
I foresee people being variously affected by this as follows:
- Some people, especially light users, won’t care or won’t understand the
significance of it. The new Outlook may work acceptably for them.
- Some people may find their email doesn’t properly sync with their
provider. At the time of writing, for example, there’s a list of
known issues using Outlook with Gmail.
- Some people won’t like the idea that Microsoft is storing a copy of all
their mail in its own cloud service.
- Some people will note that by duplicating all their email in the cloud,
Microsoft is increasing their carbon footprint.
Finally, it’s important to note that the new Outlook may not yet have
some of the features you expect. If you’re a power user, you can check
the
roadmap to see what Microsoft plans to make available and when.
What are the alternatives?
If you currently use Outlook but don’t want to switch to the new version,
broadly speaking you have two choices:
- Use an alternative email client, like
Thunderbird or
eM Client. If you have a Mac, try
the built-in
Mail
app.
- Use webmail. This means accessing your email in a
browser – like Chrome, Edge,
Firefox or Safari – via the website of your email provider.